In a public message addressed to the people of the United States on Wednesday, April 1, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian denied his country has ever been a threat to the US or to people in the region, claiming Iran is fighting against attempts to establish domination.

“Portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present day observable facts,” Pezeshkian said noting that “such a perception is the product of political and economic whims of the powerful – the need to manufacture an enemy in order to justify pressure, maintain dominance, sustain the arms industry, and control strategic markets.”

Underlining that “in such an environment, if a threat does not exist, it is invented.”

The message addressed to “the people of US and to all those who, amid a flood of distortions and manufactured narratives continue to seek the truth and aspire to a better life,” came as hundreds of thousands of Iranians flooded the streets of various cities of the country in support of country’s defensive actions against the US-Israeli war which has completed more than a month and killed over 3,000 people and injured thousands others.

The message preempted US President Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Wednesday in which he repeated his claims of “winning the war” and issued threats to bomb Iran to obliteration “for the safety of Americans and for a free world.”

Pezeshkian reiterated that in its modern history Iran has never chosen a path of “aggression, expansion, colonialism or domination” and has never initiated a war despite its military strength and sustained pressure from global powers.

“Iranian people harbor no enmity towards other nations, including the people of America, Europe or neighboring countries” and have always distinguished between the governments and people they govern.

Iranian military build up is defensive

Iran’s attempts to strengthen its military capabilities, Pezeshkian claimed, is a direct result of US military build up in the region as “no country confronted with such conditions would forgo strengthening its defensive capabilities.”

The US has scores of military bases in various countries surrounding Iran in the region. These bases include the headquarters of its navy’s fifth fleet in Bahrain, a few hundreds kilometers away from the Iranian borders.

“What Iran has done – and continues to do – is a measured response grounded in legitimate self-defense, and by no means an initiation of war or aggression,” Pezeshkian claimed, noting that hostility towards and distrust of the US is rooted in the history of its interventionist and hegemonic policies.

Iran’s relationship with the US became hostile following its attempts to control the country’s natural resources through orchestrating a coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, Pezeshkian underlined.

This hostility towards the US became intense after it supported the regressive regime of the Shah (1953-1979) for decades, supplied weapons to Saddam Hussain during his eight-year war on Iranian people, and imposed “the longest and most comprehensive sanctions in modern history.”

This distrust multiplied after Iran was subjected to unprovoked military aggression twice in the midst of negotiations in the last year.

Murder of innocents and destruction of the nation

Asserting that “the destructive and inhuman impact of sanctions, war, and aggression on the lives of the resilient Iranian people must not be underestimated,” Pezeshkian claimed that “the continuation of military aggression and recent bombings profoundly affect people’s lives, attitudes and perspectives” towards the countries involved.

Pezeshkian questioned the logic of the war and sanctions when Iran had been true to its commitments under previous agreements such as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and was more than willing to negotiate and agree to further restrict its nuclear program.

Trump withdrew unilaterally from the multi-party JCPOA under his first term as president in 2018, demanding new conditions. He reimposed sanctions and carried out assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, one of the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Corps (IRGC) in 2020. Trump bragged about both in his address on April 1, claiming Iran would be much stronger had he not withdrawn from JCPOA and assassinated Soleimani.

Does “massacring of innocent children, the destruction of cancer-treatment pharmaceutical facilities, or boasting about bombing a country back to the stone ages serve any purpose other than further damaging the US global standing?” Pezeshkian asked.

Proxy of Israel

Pointing out how attacking Iran’s vital infrastructure directly targets the Iranian people and constitutes a war crime, Pezeshkian said that such acts “generate instability, increase human and economic costs, and perpetuate cycles of tension, planting seeds of resentments that will endure for years.”

He rejected the claims made by Trump and his colleagues of calling the destruction of Iranian infrastructure a “demonstration of strength” claiming it is rather “a sign of strategic bewilderment and an inability to achieve a sustainable solution.”

Pezeshkian called the US-Israeli aggression against Iran a “war of choice”, claiming US involvement in it is just to serve Israel which has “manufactured an Iranian threat to divert world’s attention from its crimes in Palestine.”

“Is it not the case that America has entered this aggression as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime,” he asked.

In this context, he also questioned the slogan of “America First” devised by Trump and his campaign during the elections, claiming that the ruling class in the United States is trying to serve the illegitimate objectives of Israel at the cost of interests of the common Americans.

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